Wednesday, 11 September 2013

Aspects of Wagnerian Love: Sister, Bride, Wife and Son

(originally published as a programme note to a Salzburg Festival Concert, August 2013: programme details below)

Richard
Wagner (1813–1886)

Siegfried-Idyll
in E major, WWV 103

Act
One of Die Walküre, WWV 86 B

Springtime Passion: The
Heat of the Moment

If ever there were an act taken from
Wagner’s Ring one might elect to
perform in isolation, arguably from his entire oeuvre, it would be the first
act of Die Walküre. It ‘works’ by
itself; although only an incurious soul would not to wish to know what happens
next, you do not need Das Rheingold to
make sense of it. That is not, of course, to say that knowledge of the
‘preliminary evening’ does not have one appreciating Die Walküre differently, more deeply. The very contrast of
sound-worlds between the frigid realm of gods, dwarves and giants, in which the
goddess of love, Freia, is little more than a cipher, and the world of what
Wagner, in thrall to the ‘sensualist’ philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, called
the ‘purely human’ is an implied part of the dramatic experience. Yet even the
first-time listener will be drawn in by the Walküre
tale of a brutalized woman falling in love with a mysterious outlawed visitor,
the liberator in whom she will recognize herself and her true potential as a
human being and who will likewise recognize himself in her. This is a Romantic
journey from darkness to light, just as Wagner would have found in the
archetypal musical example, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

With Wagner, tonal relations are more
complex, arguably more equivocal, than in Beethoven. The Ring as a whole opens in E flat major, or rather it opens with that
celebrated low E flat, from which even tonality itself seems to evolve, just as
life itself may be understood to evolve from the Rhine in the Rheingold Prelude. Götterdämmerung concludes in D flat major, ‘flatter’ than the ‘natural
world’ opening to the cycle, and indeed the key associated with the gods’
fortress of Valhalla. Yet the progression experienced in the first act of Die Walküre, if not quite so
straightforward as that of Beethoven’s C minor to C major ‘narrative’, still
brings with it a clear transformation, from the D minor of the Prelude’s
extraordinary opening storm – Beethoven again a progenitor, not least in the Pastoral Symphony, though Wagner goes
further in conceptual weight and arguably in sheer fury – to the blazing full
orchestral triumph of G major as the curtain falls. That scorching climax,
frankly erotic rather than metaphysically Beethovenian, occurs just in time in
terms of stage action to spare prudish blushes as brother and sister cross the
final frontier of mutual and self-exploration. Even then, however, we must
register a qualification – opening and climax sharing a similarity of heroic
Volsung defiance – in the flattened subdominant final chord that intensifies
the dramatic excitement, yet hints at trouble in store.

Let us take a few steps back to the
emergence of Siegmund from wild storm and dark forest. A proud example from
Wagner’s line of charismatic heroes, he disdains bourgeois society as it
disdains him: morally, politically – and violently. Like Parsifal, he stands so
far outside civilization that he knows not even his name. He calls himself
‘Wehwalt’ (woeful) but only discovers his ‘true’ name, Siegmund (victorious
protector), when his sister-bride bestows it upon him through love. Siegmund
comes closer than most to the revolutionary Wagner wished himself to be.
Marriage, forcible subjugation of Sieglinde as chattel by her thuggish husband,
Hunding, is to be vanquished, on account both of its instantiation of bourgeois
property rights and its thwarting the overpowering love Siegmund and Sieglinde discover
in each other. Only later on, in Tristan und Isolde
and in Götterdämmerung, do we
discover that Romantic love is itself a form of power and thus equally to be
suspected. We hear that from a beautiful heart-rending solo cello motif, voiced
as water and Sieglinde refresh the fugitive visitor. It will develop into a fully
blown theme of sexual love as their feelings develop: ‘Du bist der Lenz’ (you
are the spring), Sieglinde will tell him. The emotional world conjured into
being as liberation from the stern prison of emotional winter proves as vernal
as anything Wagner wrote.

In
the meantime, Hunding has returned home. According to customary laws of
hospitality –Hunding is nothing if not conventional – the head of the household
must offer shelter for the night. He distrusts his visitor, however, as he
distrusts all novelty, and notes a suspicious kinship to Sieglinde; it is all
in the eyes. It transpires that ‘Wehwalt’ is a foe of Hunding and his kin. Prefiguring
his liberation of Sieglinde, ‘Wehwalt’ has rescued a child-bride forced by her
family into a loveless marriage; the brothers who were slain are of Hunding’s
clan. Though custom will constrain him this evening, Hunding announces his
intention to avenge those deaths and the affront to patriarchy the following
morning. Sieglinde drugs her tormentor and joins Siegmund, revealing the secret
of the sword in the tree, awaiting a great hero. Siegmund’s father ‘Wälse’ – in
reality, a disguised Wotan, roaming the human world in search of something ‘new’
– had promised
him a sword that he would find ‘in höchster Not’ (in deepest need). The phallic
symbolism of extraction is not subtle, nor should it be. Music and words
emphasize Siegmund’s triumph: Siegmund the Volsung,
you see, woman! As bridal gift he brings you this sword.’ (‘Siegmund, den
Wälsung, siehst du, Weib! Als Brautgabe bringt er dies Schwert.’) The final
revelation comes with Sieglinde’s recognition in Siegmund of the brother
from whom she has long been separated. In defiance of the bourgeois morality of
Hunding and his protectress, Fricka – Wagner, in a letter, derided her as the
voice of mere ‘custom’ – Siegmund takes his twin as ‘bride
and sister’
(‘Braut und Schwester’). Thus will the blood of the Volsung race flourish (inspiring
Thomas Mann initially unpublished 1906 novella Wälsungenblut).

Though one might deem this a tragedy
considered in full – Carl Dahlhaus wrote of ‘the tragedy of the incestuous love
of Siegmund and Sieglinde’ – and it is certainly true that both parties ultimately
meet their death rather than enjoy or endure a ‘happy marriage’, ‘tragic’ is
not how it feels. There is greatness in Siegmund’s subsequent rejection of
Valhalla and immortality because Sieglinde will not be admitted; that greatness
is born not only in his character but also in the transformative quality of the
Volsungs’ love. Shocking experience of that very same quality will initiate
Brünnhilde’s transformation from steely, inhuman Valkyrie to ‘purely-human’
woman. When, moreover, we come in the second act to Siegmund’s death, we understand
it in the light of that love’s blazing conviction. A thoroughgoing anarchist in
matters of love as well as politics, indeed a political thinker who recognized
their inextricable interrelation, Wagner insisted that nothing endured for ever.
Such, we discover in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung,
had been Wotan’s error, to inscribe treaties as runes upon his spear,
attempting to render eternal that which could only have had temporary validity.
So it is for Wagner, the Dresden comrade-in-arms of Mikhail Bakunin and student
of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Who knows what might happen to Siegmund and
Sieglinde in old age? The very idea seems preposterous. Indeed, when, in the
subsequent generation, Brünnhilde attempts to perpetuate her union with
Siegfried beyond its natural life, tragedy ensues. Wagner captures the Volsungs’
springtime passion in all its immediacy, its immanence – always a primary
concern to Wagner who, as a student of Young Hegelianism, stood determined to
bring heaven down to earth. There is no Hans Sachs here, ready to counsel the
youthfully impetuous that they need plan further ahead.

Foolhardy, indeed doomed, in the face of
societal opposition though their love might be, what matters is the here and
now; what matters in retrospect is the there and then. When Wotan returns in
the second act, he will be weighed down by reflection, by consequences, whereas
Siegmund and Sieglinde do not reflect, they simply act. Theirs is the Young
Hegelian ‘Philosophie der Tat’ (philosophy of action) or of ‘the deed’. It may
not be a ‘solution’ to the world’s problems. As Wagner discovered, the more he
thought about it, the further away that seemed, hence his immersion in the
‘pessimistic’ philosophy of Schopenhauer, which he nevertheless declined to
accept wholesale. The Volsungs’ deeds nevertheless thrill and inspire, especially
in the white heat of the moment.

Autumnal Progeny: A Return
to the Symphony?

The flourishing of Volsung blood will
find its fruit in Siegfried, born of Sieglinde at the moment of her death. We
encounter the younger hero in Siegfried
and, at a certain remove in the Siegfried-Idyll,
or, to grant it its full dedicatory title Tribschen
Idyll with Fidi-Birdsong and Orange Sunrise as Symphonic Birthday Greeting
Offered to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870 – and one thought Hans Sachs’s christening
of the Meistersinger melody,
‘selige-Morgentraum Deutweise’, lacked catchiness. Siegfried Wagner was born in
June 1869, whilst work on the draft of Siegfried,
from which the thematic material of the Idyll
is taken, was completed the following month. Two sons, Wagner’s and the
Volsungs’, thereby became intertwined in family mythology (though both would
fail to meet unrealistic expectations).We can smile at the marked contrast between the bourgeois family idyll,
Cosima’s divorce from Hans von Bülow notwithstanding, the Wagners had created
and the memory of Wagner’s anarchistic attacks upon that self-same thing. Or we
can simply enjoy for what it is Wagner’s finest instrumental work: performed on
that Tribschen Christmas Day as chamber music, yet conceived, as the autograph
score attests, as a ‘symphony’.

Tribschen

Wagner was too hard upon some of his
other instrumental efforts, yet he knew the value of this ‘symphony’ in
modified sonata form, founded not so much upon Beethovenian dialectics as an
idea of development rooted in musico-dramatic ‘endless melody’. Cosima recorded
the following thoughts in her diary on on 30 August 1877:

He
plays me the sonata for Math[ilde] Wesendonck and laughs heartily at its
'triviality'. […] He says he has never been able to write an occasional piece –
this sonata is shallow, nondescript, the Albumblatt
for Betty Schott is artificial; only with the Idyll had he been successful, because in that everything came
together.

This lullaby of peace, joy and
world-inheritance, to employ the conventional leitmotif references from the
opera, may be our key to imagining those post-Parsifal ‘symphonies’ Wagner often envisaged, yet was never granted
time to write. It seems they might have stood closer to Liszt than Bruckner,
let alone Brahms.